Happy Tolkien Reading Day!

Yes, yes, I know it has been mighty quiet around here. And I know I sort of voiced an intention to reform my bad-blogger self and show a certain amount of commitment to the old hobbit hole on the ze internetz... I was careful not to promise reform, mind, as I know myself too well to be making promises I can't keep. I have been busy with all sorts of craftiness, ranging from Sharpie mugs to rosary-making, and I have pictures, and a day may come when I use those pictures to create an interesting post - but today is not that day!

This day, we fight! Wait, no we don't. What am I saying? It is Tolkien Reading Day, so reading is the order of the day.., and of course, a good Tolkienist like myself must make some sort of an appearance, right? I shall do you one better than that. I shall provide you with this link here of an extremely well-voiced gentleman reading aloud the first few chapters of Farmer Giles of Ham - which is quite delightful. I am at present getting my bit of Tolkien in by listening to it, whilst sipping a mug of home made chai tea. You all should take a few moments to listen to at least the first chapter as Farmer Giles is a most entertaining, contrary-hobbit of a man, and it is full of a Tolkien's curious sense of humour - a droll blend, tongue-in-cheek and dry, broad, yet erudite. It is great fun.

Well, I'm Back

So the battle raged, and the cannons flashed, and the beleaguered soldier, running low on supplies and completely out of ammunition, hunkered down in the trench, and waited for it to be over. And then: a sun rise. A bird call. The soldier cautiously peered over the top, and realised that the battle was over and all was peace.

All right, so that description is a little extreme. However, for the moment, that rather idiotic stream of bad luck seems to have abated. I think I have manage to go a whole week without a single episode of drama worth talking about. I want to thank all of you lovely people who still left comments and encouragement during the time when I was computer-less. And thanks also to all of you who have tagged me - especially Miss Muffin for the Lord of the Rings tag - I always love a chance to talk about those books! I intend to get to all the tags as soon as possible, but this post is primarily a wave to the world.

So what has happened since the last time I posted? Well, the Perpetually Overheating Subaru came back. It does not seem to be overheating any longer - quite the opposite. The temperature gage seldom moves off the cold setting at all, even when I take it over the mountain to see if it will behave itself. I find this very unsettling, and find myself watching the temperature with as much concern as ever I did when it ran hot. Still, I must admit that it seems to be running quite well. The engine... purrs.... my very ordinary snow-country car has a purring engine. I understand why car-guys like that sound so much. And it's handling very well. I find myself cruising along so smoothly that I am suddenly 10 miles over the speed limit and felt it not. Indeed, it seems to be running almost too well, and I am suspicious of its motives. On the advice of my sisters - who have a thing for naming cars, I have decided to christen mine "Loki"- partly because it is green and gold, but mostly because Loki is called "The Doer of Good and the Doer of Evil" which seems to fit my car's unchancy behaviour. I have also decided that I like it well enough to finally apply the Tree of Gondor decal I got for Christmas:

F O R     G O N D O R !

It sits right smack in the center of the back window, and is subtle enough not to make me look like the total Tolkienist that I am, but at the same time, obvious enough to delight the eye of my fellow Tolkienists. I can now yell, "For Gondor!" when I run for my car after work, if I want to. This pleases me exceedingly.

I also am in possession of a new laptop. It is a brand new Toshiba, which I bought on an insanely good sale through Amazon. It is quite nice - solid black, lovely keyboard, wide screen, much lighter than the old one. It did come with the Windows 8 Operating System, which I have found completely obnoxious ever since it first came out, but have downloaded and app to make it behave more like Windows 7, which is handy. There are a ton of apps on the thing, which I will never use, and I am deleting them from the computer. I suspect that they are the reason it seems to run slowly some times. I shall have to sit down sometime soon and see if I can look up what I actually need on the computer, and what I can jettison. But in the meantime, it is working out better than I thought it would, and I am liking it more than I expected:

Let the blogging begin!

Contrary to what that picture suggests, I am not really being that cavalier with liquids near the new Toshiba. I am mildly paranoid of ruining it. I mean, the car is running and I have a computer and it has been a whole week since the last spot of Drama.... best not to take any chances!

With the abatement of trying things, my creative streak, which, had hunkered down as well, seems to have revived. I have just started writing again, and it is as slow going as it was back in November, between the research and the way the story is deciding to tell itself, and me having to really care about it when I am writing it. Mostly, I am doodling in a moleskin notebook - some pencil sketches and some watercolours. Not much to speak of, but there is a sense of satisfaction in keeping one's hand in, so to speak:

Typical Mahri stuff. There is the ever present piper, drawn from the back (my favourite pose for a piper, as I have mention in various previous posts. A sword, of course, because I seem to draw a lot of swords. A bottle of ink and a fountain pen, sketched from life during a break at work. A diced glengarry bonnet, also sketched from life, during a longer break from work. Ship's sails, because I am trying to get into the feel of the story I am writing. The dragon was done in a slightly more challenging pose than is usual for me - there is no point in practising if one does not make an effort to test oneself. Free hand watercolour doodles, because I am intimidated by the idea, but really want to be able to do it.

And then there is this:

It is a haiku, and a very odd splashy illustration to go with it. I don't normally write haikus, for all they are a very traditional form of poetry and I am a very tradition poet. However, I run a small teen writing group at the library, and I really want to be able to do some quick poetry exercises with my kids next month, April being National Poetry Month. I thought that haikus would be an excellent form as an introduction to poetry, because they are very short, they don't have to rhyme, and they are very strict about rhythm: five syllables in the first line, seven in the second, five in the last - seventeen syllables all together. Furthermore, they would make wonderful warm-up writing exercises, as they force one to pay particular attention to economy with words - to take care to use just the right word, and leave out what does not need to be... So far, so good, but, as I said before, I don't write haikus. If I expect my kids to write one, I'd better be able to come up with one myself.

I sat and I mused. It was rainy yesterday, and cool. A welcome change from the abnormal warmth we've been visited with this winter. It smelled nice, and it was beautiful, and my poor, winter-starved heart was happy to see it. This is pretty much how I have felt on the extremely rare occasions that we have gotten precipitation this year. I jotted this down, tweaked the wording over the course of the day, and then came home and painted this. 

And that, in a nutshell, has been my week. Now that things have returned to normality, I intend - though, of course, know better than to promise - a more regular blogging schedule. 

The Lord is Testing Me....

So, 2015 hasn't exactly got off on the right foot for me this year.Things just keep happening. Trying Things. Demoralising Things. Stupid, Why-Is-This-Happening-To-Me Things. And Things you'd rather didn't happen, but are the price of being Human in a Fallen World, and which make all the Other Things seem much more upsetting than they usually would be.

Some of the Things are small, and take care of themselves, such as plumbing problems, which are caused by a neighbour's nearly-frozen pipes, and that cleared themselves up as soon as there was no more near-frozeness to vex them.

Somethings are entirely out of one's hands, and have a slightly adventuresome feel to them,such as work-related crisises. When one works with the General Public, and the General Public happens to include Lunatics and Entitled Itinerants, there is bound to be a fair dose of Drama and Weirdness- often in tandem.

And then there are the Things that make you feel like Tevya on Fiddler on the Roof: "Sometimes I think, when it gets too quiet up there, You say to Yourself, "What kind of mischief can I play on My friend, Maria?" I an I have had rather a lot of those sorts of Things on top of all the Other Things.

Take, for example, the Perpetually Overheating Car:

The Subaru which is my current vehicle has had this trouble since I bought the thing. It is a used car, and the people who owned it before me must have stored it near a dryer, because the radiator was full of lint. I kid you not. My car was overheating because of someone else's linty laundry. So the mechanic power-flushed it, and it ran a champion.....And then, it was overheating again, and the radiator was needing to be replaced - no doubt because of all the stress it had been under from all that lint. Then there was the false-alarms,which was a faulty temperature gauge. It was replaced, and seemed to sort the issue for a while, but then it started doing this cute thing where it the temperature would occasional spike, and immediately drop down again. Not often, just enough to be troubling. The car was still running like a champion.... Until I went out, one day,just before Christmas, and the car wouldn't start at all. It made a dreadful asthmatic coughing, that seemed to tear it apart from the inside. So I had to have it towed, and the Mechanic re-built the engine, and declared that that had sorted the silly monkey, and I'd have no further bother with it. 

And then the car overheated when I tried to take it Off The Hill For Mass.I didn't get very far - maybe 15 minutes into the drive, and the temperature rocketed up into dangerous territory. I pulled over and contemplated for a while. The engine sounded fine, and there was no steam coming from it, and I was not far from home, so I decided to turn around and try again in someone else's vehicle. The car died just short of my home, steaming like a hot-springs, and smelling to high-heaven. So back to the Mechanic it went.

And then, one of those Other Things happened - to whit, I spilled coffee on my venerable old laptop, and even though I did all the things you are supposed to do to save it from such a calamitous event, including opening it up and checking for interiour damage (of which I saw none) it hath died the death, and I am at present without a computer, and loath to look for one, until I have word from the mechanic as to whether the Subaru is worth investing in any farther....

And today's crisis? The Loaner Landy, which the Mechanic bequeathed to me, whilst he struggles to discover what, exactly is the issue with that Dratted Subaru- and which has been in my possession a grand total of 3 days, and driven me a grand total of about 10 miles - that is, to work and back.... it has a flat tire. Totally flat.No air at all. Sitting on the rim. And the valve cap is missing. And it was fine last night! So it wasn't my fault!

So... that's what's going on here.Perhaps I broke a mirror and don't remember it..... perhaps there is a curse on me. But I sure could use a Nice Thing for a change!

The High Crusade

My aged computer hath given up the ghost. This is a source of some sadness and more difficulty to me. I am no good at gadgety shopping. Quite frankly, I was rather fond of the old laptop and am not like to take to a new one, just at first. But ah well, that is Life for you. If my posting becomes more spotty than usual, you know that I have a good excuse for it.

And now... a book review. The High Crusade by Poul Anderson:

I picked this book up on a whim that had next to nothing to do with that cover, and a good deal to do with the jacket summary:

In the year of grace 1345, as Sir Roger Baron de Tourneville is gathering an army to join King Edward III in the war against France, a most astonishing event occurs: a huge silver ship descends through the sky and lands in a pasture beside the little village of Ansby in northeastern Lincolnshire. The Wersgorix, whose scouting ship it is, are quite expert at taking over planets, and having determined from orbit that this one was suitable, they initiate standard world-conquering procedure. Ah, but this time it's no mere primitives the Wersgorix seek to enslave—they've launched their invasion against free Englishmen! In the end, only one alien is left alive—and Sir Roger's grand vision is born. He intends for the creature to fly the ship first to France to aid his King, then on to the Holy Land to vanquish the infidel. Unfortunately, he has not allowed for the treachery of the alien pilot, who instead takes the craft to his home planet, where, he thinks, these upstart barbarians will have no choice but to surrender. But that knavish alien little understands the indomitable will and clever resourcefulness of Englishmen, no matter how great the odds against them. . . .

I am not sure what I was expecting from the book. I am no great fan of science fiction, and I have been suffering from Tolkien-deprivation since reading Beowulf, which I received for Christmas this year. The High Crusade is definitely not Tolkien, but it does make for good reading. It is a short story, narrated in a curiously tongue-in-cheek, medievally-flavoured English. It is over-the-top, full of flashy battle scenes, led by Sir Roger, mounted upon his horse and crying, "God save the right!" or "For England and St. George!" - paradoxical pageantry splashed against cold, metallic technology. It is light-hearted and good-hearted at the same time. Yet, despite the sheer jollity of the narrative, and the slenderness of the volume, it touches upon serious themes: what constitutes true freedom, and the dangers of a society too much dependent upon the government; the folly of under-estimating the inspired 'little-guy'; the value of commitment, of sacrifice, of duty and nobility. It isn't so much that the book explores the themes, but that the characters simply take a certain outlook for granted, and view Life through the lens of that outlook. It is hearteningly decent and honest - a farcical tale, with truth at its heart.

Furthermore, I was delighted by the treatment of religion in The High Crusade. One of the things I find particularly vexing about fantasy and science fiction, is the tendency to be somewhat slighting, if not down-right hateful, about religion in general, and Christianity in particular. This book is told from the perspective of the monk, Brother Parvus, and everything that happens to the Englishmen is recounted in a simply Christian worldview. There were one or two times, early on in the book, which seemed a trifle flippant about certain practices of the Faith, and it niggled - not because it was particularly offensive, but because the monkish narrator would not have written in such a tone. However, as the story goes on, and the English regularly pray before battle and celebrate Masses of thanksgiving afterwards, I think I was mistaken to read so much into it. I do not believe that Poul Anderson was a Catholic. I'm not even sure he was a practicing Christian, but he had respect for the Faith, and that came out in his storytelling. Moreover, the Epilogue finished up with a brief note on the spread of the Faith throughout alien nations, with a surprisingly orthodox comment about the Papacy, which delighted me to no end.

I short, should any of you be looking to kill an evening with a bit of adventure, I'd recommend The High Crusade unreservedly. Indeed, I intend to read a good deal more by this author in the near future. 

The Eleventh Hour Post

... And looking at the time on the corner of my screen, that is pretty literal. I have been far spottier about making Christmas posts than I intended to be this year, but it seemed a pity to let the last day of Christmas go by without remark, so here is one last quick post. 

Today is the the feast of the Epiphany, also known as Three Kings Day and Little Christmas. As you might guess from the second name on the list, it is the day in which we commemorate the visit of the Magi to the Child Jesus. In many traditions, this is the gift-giving day of Christmas. In my family, we truly do celebrate it as a little Christmas, with a few small gifts, a fancy dinner, and general merriment.  It is a very pleasant tradition.

Although Epiphany has been celebrated since the very early days of Christianity, I found it surprisingly difficult to find a proper song for the day, aside from We Three Kings - which is a very fine song, but not particularly remarkable, it being very well known. But I persevered, and found this song, which has a sort of charm about it:

The Professor.

You knew it was coming, right? The  happy-birthday-dear-Tolkien post smack in the middle of Christmas. According to the Tolkien Society, all admirers of the Professor  are supposed to offer up a birthday toast to him at 9 pm this evening. We fill our glasses with goodly drink, stand and say, "The Professor!" Yes, I am going to do that. With my Christmas whisky, which is very good indeed. Yes it is quirky of me. I don't care. 

In honour of Christmas and Tolkien, I am presenting you with the lyrics for a carol entitled All Mydle Erthe It Shall Fulyll - and yes, that really is Middle Earth. Tolkien didn't invent that term, he adopted it. (Fans of Thor might be familiar with Midgard. It means the same thing.) I have not bothered to update the spelling, nor replace "u" with "v" (that word is venite)

A voyce from heven to erth shal com:
"Uenite ad iudicium."

This voyce both sharp and also shryll
Shall be herd from heuen to hell
All mydle erthe it shall fulfyll
    Uenite ad iudicium.
        A voyce. etc.

Uenite is a blyssed song
For them that for ioye dooth longe
And shall forsake paynes strong
    Uenite ad iudicium
    A voyce. etc.

Glad in hert may they be
Whan Chryst sayeth Uenite
Ye blyssed chyldren come to me
    Into vitam eternam
        A voyce. etc.

Whan I hongred ne gaue me meat
Ye clothed me agaynst the weat
In trouble ye dyde me not forgeat
    Uenite ad iudicium
        A voyce. etc.

Ye socoured me at your doore
And for my sake gaue to the poore
Therfore wyll I you socoore
    Uenite ad iudicium.
        A voyce. etc.

Sory in hert may they be
That hereth this heuy worde, Ite
Ye cursed chyldren go fro me
    In to ignem eternum
        A voyce. etc.

Whan for nede that I dyde crye
Confortlesse ye lete me dye
Therfore now I you deny
    Uenite ad iudicium
        A voyce. etc.

For by me ye set no store
Ye shall abye ryght dere therfore
In hell with deuyls for euermore
    Uenite ad iudicium
        A voyce. etc.

            Finis.

And since I know that was a lot of archaic language to skim through, I am also providing two Christmas Carols. O Come All Ye Faithful  in Sindarin (which is the elvish you mostly hear spoken in the Lord of the Rings movies)

And also In Dulce Jubilo - a macaronic carol, originally in Latin and German, but in this case, Latin and Quenya - Quenya being High Elvish, and the language Galadriel used when she sang Namarie:

And lastly, this rather lovely little thing - Ve Eärendil vanima . Click on "show more" for the translation, and to find out more about it. Just do it. You'll not be sorry.

The New Year, It Hath Entered In....

You know what I really wanted to post for this day?  A video of Billy Boyd singing "Auld Lang Syne".  I thought I should be able to find one without too much bother. After all, the man sings, quite sweetly.  He's Scottish, and that is a Scottish song, and New Year's Day is a big deal in Scotland..... Well, let me tell you something. It is not easy to find. Quite the contrary. Indeed, if a recording of the wee man singing that particular song exists at all, it has somehow managed to avoid making an appearance on ze internetz - and in this day and age, no less. Apparently, miracles do still occur. 

So, since I canna welcome in the New Year with whimsy, I shall welcome it with an old  Welsh New Year's Carol called Levy-Dew. Benjamin Britten put it to music, so it was rather a challenge to find a cover of it that was not beautifully sung in four parts by classically trained voices. You are getting this version partly because it was one of the few non-choir versions I came across, and partly because I was quietly amused by the intro:

But I also wanted something a trifle more robust.  I had clearly in mind the sort of tune I wanted, but one of the discouraging things about being me is that there is a gulf between the sort of thing I like to listen to - ancient tunes with lots of history, sung by people with satisfying voices, enjoying themselves hugely - and what people actually sing - notably, songs for a swingin' New Year.  I don't swing, and a mere rotation of the Earth around the Sun is not enough to prompt me to change my ways now.  I found this, and while it is not an old tune, it has rather satisfying harmonies to it, and sings of bonfires with an enthusiasm that makes me want one myself - and not just because it is currently -2 degrees outside:

Please do not ask me why one video is so much smaller than the other. I used the same method for embedding them both, and got different results. I should be able to figure it out, as I am taking a coding class, but it is 9 am on New Year's Morning, and I don't feel like it. So there.

Wait... that preview is terrible. Oh, all right. Let me go have a gander at that html.... oh look.... the top one shows a width of 516 and the bottom one a mere 420.... let me just change that....  and hit preview again.... CACKLE!....     Behold, vids of the same size, for a balanced look. Might as well start the New Year off right, eh?

And on that note, I go to brew some cappuccino for the breaking of my fast. Happy New Year!